By
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I am going to write about the poem called The Charge of the Light Brigade. This poem was written by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born on the 6th August 1809 and died on the 6th October 1892. Tennyson wrote the poem in a few minutes in the year 1854. Tennyson wrote this to remember all of the men who fought and died in the Battle of Balaclava which happened on the 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War.
It was the poet's method to use catch phrases that attracted his interest, which he thought of, was a good description of the battle itself. In this case, the phrase from a newspaper article which he would read from to get some inspiration from, "some hideous blunder," which appears in the poem as "someone had blundered". This might indicate that Tennyson was seeking to blame someone for the disastrous massacre that wiped out the Light Brigade. This poem is about courage, not about the bad luck or stupidity that put the men of the Light Brigade cavalry in a position to display that courage.
The Charge of the Light Brigade is divided into six stanzas that vary from six to twelve lines each. The rhyme scheme is uneven, sometimes strongly linking three lines in a row, skipping a line or two, then returning to the rhyme. Sometimes the rhymes are not perfect, such as the connection made between "hundred" and "blundered” this is what they call a half-rhyme.
The poem tells the story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the “valley of death”. They were obeying a command to charge the enemy forces.
Not a single soldier was discouraged or distressed by the command to charge forward, even though all the soldiers realized that their commander had made a terrible mistake: “Someone had blundered.” The role of the soldier is to obey and “not to make reply...not to reason why,” so they followed orders and rode into the “valley of death.”
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